Spirits
by Betty BOKOR
Summary: SamDaniel. Sam becomes host to an alien spirit and Daniel feels confused by her actions.


**Spirits **by Betty Bokor  
Sam/Daniel. Daniel feels confused by Sam's actions.  
Spoilers: All seasons, including 9.  
Disclaimer: The Stargate original characters belong to MGM/Showtime, Double Secret Productions, and Gekko Film Corp. This was written strictly for the purpose of entertainment. No attempt at copyright infringement has been made.

**Spirits**

SG-1 crossed the gate and found exactly what the M.A.L.P. had shown, a rather sterile expanse of land with some decaying monuments in the distance. The structures had awakened Daniel's curiosity because of their similarity with Ancient buildings they had encountered before. As soon as they crossed through the event horizon, Col. Mitchell organized his team. They reached the ruins in less than twenty minutes. Mitchell and Teal'c started setting up their encampment while Sam collected her customary soil samples. Daniel set out to find inscriptions on any of the walls.

They had spent almost forty minutes working on their tasks when Sam screamed loudly from behind a wall. Her three teammates rushed to her and found her unconscious on the ground. She didn't have any visible signs of injury and, after Mitchell attempted a few times to wake her up, she opened her eyes and looked at them. At first she looked confused; then, she grabbed her head with both her hands and sat up.

"Sam? Daniel inquired.

"It's in my head," she said with desperation on her voice. "It's a Goa'uld! Oh, please take it away!"

Mitchell and Teal'c immediately drew out their weapons and pointed them at her.

"Sam, let me see the back of your neck," Daniel said approaching her carefully. "You should have an entry point, unless it went through your mouth."

She vehemently shook her head and let Daniel examine her neck.

"There's nothing here," he said after a careful examination. "Sam, why do you think you have a Goa'uld in you? Where did it come from? Did you break any containers? It couldn't have survived on the ground, Sam."

Sam kept grabbing her head and nodding while crying.

Teal'c slowly approached her, without letting down his guard. "ColonelCarter, I do not sense a Goa'uld in you. If you had one, its presence would be clear to me," he said with conviction.

"I can hear him talking in my head!" Sam said with anguish.

"Tell me what you hear, Sam," Daniel said.

"He's saying he wants to help us, that he's been alone here for so long," Sam started slowly.

"What else?" Mitchell wanted to know.

"He says he knows us; he knows our kind."

"Well, we want to know who he is and why he's in you," the Colonel demanded.

"He says he will leave me before we cross back through the gate, but he does not have any other way to communicate with us while we are here," Sam transmitted.

"How do we know we can trust him?" Cam insisted.

Sam stayed silent for a minute and then, with a sigh, she said. "Her name is Ulúa; she's a female of her species. She was left here to ensure that nobody would be allowed on the planet if his intentions were not peaceful. She's a sentry stationed in an advanced position for her army; if we were to keep walking toward any village, we would be stopped by the next post. She has to remain here for ten of our years."

"So, is she going to stop us? We have peaceful intentions-" Cam started.

"She knows why we are here. Her civilization is not interested in trading anything with us. Basically they don't need us, but she is willing to help us in our battle against the Ori. Her people, in some way, also descend from the Alterans and she thinks they should help us," Sam concluded.

"If this is not hurting you, Sam, we could give it a try," Daniel said. "Maybe she will help us with the inscriptions on the southern wall. I believe they will be useful to us."

"I agree, DanielJackson," Teal'c said.

Mitchell lowered his weapon and told them, "All right, people. We'll try. You, Teal'c, keep an eye on Sam. I'm not sure how much trust to put in this Ulúa. You, Daniel, take Sam with you and see if she can help you read the inscriptions. I'm going to communicate with Landry and give him the news."

Almost an hour later, Cameron was back. He was accompanied by a M.A.L.P. that seemed full of equipment. His three teammates stopped their work with questions in their eyes.

"Bad news," their leader said as he approached them. "They are having big trouble at the SGC. There's something wrong with the gate computer and the iris is not opening for incoming wormholes. They can only open it for outgoing ones. They have sent all this stuff for us so that we make do until they fix it."

"Great," Daniel said. "Did you explain to them about Sam?"

"I did, but there's not much they can do, especially with Sam here and not there."

They decided to try and do the best they could with what they had. They didn't know how long they would have to stay and the writings on the walls seemed promising.

After a couple of days they had learned to trust Ulúa and they were getting used to having one more opinion in their discussions. Sam had explained over and over that she did not feel manipulated by the alien in her head. She did not think she would like to make the situation a permanent one, but she was willing to let it go for a little while longer. With Ulúa she could better understand Daniel's job and she was even more in awe of his abilities than before, of how he could extract the meaning of a whole paragraph by identifying a couple of key words and go beyond what was written to interpret a culture long gone. Ulúa's input was a precious tool for Daniel.

On the afternoon of the third day, Cameron found Sam sitting in the camp, alternating little bits of sugar and salt in her mouth. He felt curious and sat near her.

"Sam? What are you doing? You just made me remember something I read on your files about a guy called Urgo," he said.

"Oh, no, it's not the same. Ulúa asks permission; she wants to try things but she never makes me do anything."

"You don't feel compelled to do those things?"

"No," Sam said with conviction. "Most of the time is just curiosity about things that are not common in this world. When you're a spirit, there's not much you can feel."

"What happens if you don't want to try a particular thing?" Cameron wanted to know.

"Most of the ideas come from my mind," Sam explained. "Before, I would see a chocolate bar and half of me would go 'Hey, chocolate!' and decide to eat it, but the other half of me would say 'Too much chocolate for one day' and usually win the discussion. Now, there's a third opinion and it habitually agrees with my first half." She smiled and tried a little bit more of sugar.

Cam smiled, too, and left to relieve Teal'c who had been helping Daniel document the ruins.

Late that night, after standing guard for the camp in the first shift, Daniel went back to the tent he was sharing with Sam. She was not allowed to stand guard, so she would wait for him and every night he would discuss the results of the translations with Ulúa before going to sleep.

When he got into the tent –bigger than the ones they usually carried because of their "stranded" status– he found Sam sitting near a sidewall, looking sad.

"Sam? You all right?" he asked.

She looked at him like if she were very far away. She sighed and answered, "Yeah, I'm fine."

"Are you up for looking at these paragraphs?" he asked again.

"I'm a little tired. Can we do that tomorrow morning?"

"Sure, don't worry."

He started preparing to go to sleep when Sam turned toward him and asked, "Daniel, would you do something for Ulúa?"

"All right. What do you need?"

"She wants to… she wants to hold your hand, that's all," she said blushing a little.

"Okay," he said, feeling unsure of how to deal with it. He walked toward her and sat on the floor in front of Sam. He extended his right hand toward her and she held it with her own right hand.

"She just wants to know how it feels to hold the hand of a male of our species," she explained trying to diffuse the tension. She was smiling but her smile slowly disappeared and gave place to an expression of curiosity. While she was looking at Daniel straight in the eyes, she lifted her left hand and softly caressed his cheek, moving her fingers slowly to his chin. There, she stopped suddenly and let go of Daniel completely. She turned to her sleeping bag and started preparing it while she talked to Daniel. "Thank you. That was very informative. Let's go to sleep. Tomorrow we can keep working on the translations." She got inside her bag and added, "Good night, Daniel."

Daniel slowly got up and went back to his own sleeping bag. He turned off the lamp they had on the floor and tried to go to sleep, but he couldn't. He couldn't stop thinking about what he had felt when Sam had slightly caressed his face. He hadn't felt that way in a long time. His body had been flooded with sensations at Sam's touch, but that was not what really concerned him. He had been alone for too long and he could definitely enjoy the attention of a woman. His problem was that he had felt something beyond the physical attraction. He was certain that he was not in love with Sam –and Sam was surely in love with Jack– and he had never even ventured to think about the chance of a relationship with her. Not until that second. He was surprised at how many ideas could cross his mind in the duration of a caress.

He forced himself to think about the writings on the wall and soon he was sleeping He did not sleep well. He kept waking up feeling disoriented. Finally, before dawn, he sat up and went back to his problem. He tried to find a word for what he was feeling, but he could only come up with "rattled". Sam had rattled him, had upset his well-kept unfeeling world. Oh, he could feel for others. He could feel compassion and suffer the pain of others as his. He could empathize with mostly every emotion that surrounded him. He could see various sides of any situation, but he had no more "personal" feelings. Since Sha're's death, and even more strongly after the passing of Catherine, and the Washington self exile of Jack, he had closed himself to deep personal feelings. He had only kept his friendship with Sam and Teal'c, his caring for Cassie, and now Cam's friendship. Cam and his optimism had been a welcome breath of fresh air in his overwhelming life. However, he had been certain he was not going to risk his heart again. Too much pain, too long to overcome the losses.

How was it that now he was willing to try? He didn't even stand a chance. Why would a simple touch by Sam allow him to lower all the walls he had surrounded himself with for years? And he really wanted to let go, to enjoy that touch again and all the other simple pleasures that make it worth to risk loving just to be loved back. In those seconds, while Sam had been caressing his face, he had imagined what it would be like to receive that from someone who really cared for him, from someone who saw beyond his professional ability, from someone who wanted more from him than his friendship –and he had wanted that someone to be Sam.

He reminded himself that Sam had an entity within her. Ulúa probably influenced her more than Sam would allow herself to admit. Perhaps that was the correct point of view. If he had thought he had seen any corresponding feelings to what he had felt in Sam, they possibly were just a glint of the curiosity the alien felt. Who knew how far she was willing to go with her "experiments" if Sam didn't limit her.

He decided that the whole episode had been a lapse of madness on his part and that he had to go back to his cold life without one more thought for the incident. He got up and exited the tent.

As soon as Daniel left, Sam opened her eyes. From the corner of her eyes she had seen Daniel lost in thought on top of his sleeping bag and she has feigned sleep not to have to face him. She felt ashamed; she had allowed Ulúa to cross the limits she had clearly established for her. The alien had quickly uncovered the deep feelings Sam had for her "best friend". Sam had spent so many years hiding them. Even before she had personally met him in Abydos, she had been swept away by the mind of the man who had in a fortnight deciphered the mysteries her team had been trying to unveil for years. Then, on the desert planet, she had discovered that the extraordinary mind belonged to a beautiful man. "Beautiful" was a term she would apply often when thinking about Daniel. More than to his physical appearance –that was undoubtedly beautiful, especially in the last years, when he had built his body toward what Sam considered perfection– the term applied to his soul. Daniel's had a unique soul. She admired him in so many ways…

Ah, whom was she kidding? She had been in love with the man forever. If Sha're's fate had not twisted all their lives, she would have even fought for him. No, she wouldn't have. She respected him too much to try and interfere, but that had not stopped her from thinking more than once that he had not freely chosen Sha're as his wife and that if he hadn't been thrown into that marriage, he would have later found a better match in Sam herself. They had such a deep bond! They could share days of their lives researching together or trying to solve an earth-threatening enigma. The same easy way they enjoyed their free time at each other's homes, joining in all the activities they took pleasure from in equal manner. They didn't need too many words to communicate; they could read in each other's eyes. That's why it had been so hard to hide her feelings for him for so long, feelings he obviously did not share. She had even allowed herself to participate in the "flirting game" O'Neill had started, knowing without a doubt that he would never have the guts to go beyond that line. That had been her best cover-up operation. Sometimes she felt guilty about lying like that, but there was no other solution. If she ever admitted the truth, her friendship with Daniel would be lost, and she was not sure she would bear it. At least she had the chance every day to spend time with him.

The night before, Ulúa had pushed to share one more bit of Sam's feelings. Though Sam usually "touched" Daniel –their relationship included a very faint line when personal space was concerned– there was never anything sexual to that touch. This time there had been; it had been clear and strong. She had felt the electricity run through her. She had endangered everything she hung on to, just for a little of… what? What had she accomplished?

She was upset with Ulúa, but more with herself. She could stop her companion whenever she deemed it necessary. She had simply not wanted to. She decided to face Daniel; she was sure that he had read what she was feeling and because of that he seemed so troubled. Perhaps he didn't even want to stay with her in the same team. She had to apologize and try to mend their friendship.

Cameron and Teal'c were sharing breakfast when she got out.

"Where's Daniel?"

"He grabbed a mug with coffee and left to work on the southern wall. He wants to finish it today," Mitchell told her.

'He wants to get rid of me and my assistant as soon as possible,' Sam thought. "I'll go join him," she said out loud. She grabbed a mug that Teal'c was offering her and walked toward the ruins. Daniel was sitting on the floor, lost between papers and photographs. Now and then he would raise one hand and touch the symbols on the wall. She stood near him and observed him, until he realized she was there and raised his head. Something she could not define crossed his eyes and then he smiled at her.

"Sam, I think I finally got it. With Ulúa's input yesterday, I got it. Come and see," he said enthusiastically. Sam approached him and looked at the notes he was showing her.

"That's amazing, Daniel. The general will be elated to hear this. Ulúa was right; better knowledge of the origin of the Ori will certainly give us an advantage."

"Yeah," he said. Then he became quiet and Sam felt he was sad.

"Daniel, I need to talk to you."

"All right," he said while sitting himself more comfortably against the wall. He had no idea what Sam wanted to talk about, but it probably had to do with their discoveries of the week.

"Yesterday, in the tent-" she started hesitantly. He froze; had she noticed what he had felt? "Yesterday," Sam started again, "I let- Oh, Daniel!" She covered her face with her hands and Daniel felt her anguish.

"Tell me, Sam. You can trust me. Whatever you need to talk about, it'll be all right." He softly took her hands from her face and held them between his on his lap.

"You have to promise me," she began again, feeling desperation, "that you will still be my friend if I tell you." How could it be so difficult to talk to Daniel?

"Sam, look at me. There's nothing you could tell me, or do, or have done, that would change our friendship. You know that. You are the one person that has been the closest to me all these years. I have never had a relationship that lasted this long, not even with my parents. Jack, Teal'c, and you, are more than my family, but Teal'c one day will leave us to go back to his family, and Jack has already chosen a different path. You and I will be the only ones left. You will always be able to count on me." He softly squeezed her hands in a reassuring gesture.

"You know that I admire and respect you, Daniel," he nodded, "but I also love you," she said almost whispering.

"I know, I admire, respect, and love you, too," he added with a smile.

"No, I mean that I'm in love with you," she stopped and looked at him in the eyes. He seemed utterly surprised.

"You are?" he asked with complete disbelief.

"I know it sounds terrible, Daniel, but it's true. I've been in love with you even since before I met you."

He looked at her with a confused expression.

"Before going to Abydos I couldn't stop thinking what it would feel like to have one talk with you, to discuss any of my theories… but your theories were yet beyond mine. You left me in awe in two seconds."

Daniel kept holding her hands, though he was not sure he was interpreting Sam's words correctly.

"Yesterday night, Ulúa kept asking me; she wanted to feel what I felt when I was near you, what it felt to be in love… I've longed so much to just hold your hand like that, to touch your face when you were not facing death and destruction… I wanted to share all my life with you, not only bits and pieces."

"Sam," he said, starting to recover.

"I know that you don't feel that way about me; I just want you to still be my friend, please."

"Sam, let me say something. It's true that I had never thought about you that way. I would have never betrayed Jack; I was certain that the two of you-" Sam was shaking her head and she had tears in her eyes. It broke his heart. "All right, I believe you, but I didn't know." He lifted her hands, still in his. "Yesterday night you awoke something in me and it terrified me. For those seconds while your hand was on my face, I was the happiest man on this galaxy. I wondered if I had any chance at getting that happiness, but I told myself there was no hope." Sam was immobile, anxiously expecting his next words. "I'm not sure if it would work, but I'm willing to sacrifice anything else to give it a try. Would you like that? I have hope now."

She knelt in front of him and hugged him with all her strength. "It will work. I promise you. It will work just fine." She moved slightly and they kissed for the first time.

When they separated to breathe again, Daniel whispered "Far better than fine," before leaning to kiss her again.


End file.
